DREW FORREST Johannesburg | Friday
A UNIVERSITY research unit has calculated, at current budgetary levels, it will take 150 years to complete South Africa’s land restitution programme.
The research, by the Programme for Land Agrarian Studies (Plaas) at the University of the Western Cape, strongly suggests that government plans to accelerate land reform – in part triggered by the Zimbabwe crisis – have yet to be translated into action.
In a wide-ranging analysis of land-reform failures in South Africa, Plaas senior lecturer Edward Lahiff estimates that the 69 000 restitution claims lodged by the 1998 cut-off date will require almost R31-billion to settle.
The Department of Land Affairs has set itself five years in which to clear the restitution backlog. Mandated by the Constitution, restitution is aimed at hundreds of thousands of people dispossessed under apartheid laws.
Lahiff raises serious questions about the acceleration in the pace of restitution settlements, held out by Minister of Land Affairs Thoko Didiza as a major success. The number of settlements has risen dramatically, from 38 in December 1998 to more than 12 000 by June this year.
But Lahiff points out that 59% of the claims have been settled in cash, while only 302 000ha of land have been handed to claimants.
In addition, a provincial breakdown indicated that few claims had been settled in rural areas – where 90% of potential beneficiaries are concentrated. In rural KwaZulu-Natal and Mpumalanga the settlement levels were 2,8% and 0,07% respectively, as against 25% in urban Gauteng and 32% in the Western Cape.
The cost of settling rural claims has been estimated at between R1,5-million and R3-million per claim. This year’s restitution budget, although sharply up on previous years, stands at about R200-million.
Lahiff also tears into the government’s performance on land redistribution – the parcelling out of land to land-hungry people who have no historic claim.
This, he says, is the principal means of transferring large areas of land from whites to blacks.
He says after Didiza slapped a moratorium on new projects early last year to allow for a sweeping policy review, capital spending fell sharply to R154-million in 2000/01. The 1998/99 figure was R358-million.
A consequence of this was that the treasury had cut medium term expenditure framework allocations. The three-year expenditure guidelines dropped 23%, “at a time when spending should be increasing rapidly to meet the government’s stated delivery objectives”.
Didiza’s new policy land redistribution for agricultural development – aims to promote a class of full-time black commercial farmers. Framed in close cooperation with the World Bank and with “minimal input from land affairs department staff or civil society”, Lahiff says, it was repeatedly postponed until its formal launch on August 13 this year.
Promoting emergent farmers has its place, he says, but cannot meet the needs of millions of poor households.
At a recent briefing in Parliament, Didiza said redistribution was accelerating. About 36% of the budget was spent in the five months to end-August, as compared with 11% in the same period last year.
Lahiff praises Didiza on three fronts. She had taken “an important step” by deciding to release 669 000ha of farmland for redistribution. She had also reduced the cycle for the implementation of redistribution projects, while decentralising cumbersome “top-down” project approval procedures to the provinces.
Lahiff says the tenure reform – the third prong of the land reform programme – is the most neglected, despite its “potential to impact on more people than all other land-reform programmes combined”.
The communal land system in the former homelands is in a chaotic state, he says, with its administration spread across tribal authorities, provincial agriculture departments and other institutions – “in a state of collapse in most areas”.
Legislation securing the rights of millions of communal tenants – 13-million people live in the former homelands – could pave the way for inward investment, better natural resource use and the protection of individuals and communities, Latiff says.
However, Didiza had shelved a draft Land Rights Bill on coming to office, apparently fearing the opposition of traditional authorities.
The Bill, set for publication in April this year, is still under wraps.
Lahiff says the initial signs are that Didiza intends transferring state-owned communal land to “traditional African communities” – meaning tribal authorities. This would “simply replace one unaccountable and unrepresentative form of control with another”.
Declaring there are numerous hot spots of acute land hunger in rural and urban South Africa, and that there is widespread support for “more robust” policy, Lahiff calls for bolder steps.
Market transactions should form part of the reform programme, but it was unrealistic to think the market alone could deliver land “in the places, at the scale and at the price required”. Only the state can lead such a vast project of national renewal.
Among other things, this implied the allocation of substantially more funds to land reform.